Infinity Baby, 2017
In a near future a company conducting medical research accidentally creates a slew of babies who do not age. The film follows two men, Malcolm (Martin Starr) and Larry (Kevin Corrigan), whose job it is to find clients to adopt the unaging babies. It also follows Ben (Kieran Culkin), a manager at the company who is on a cynical hunt for romantic partnership.
There's a difference between message and delivery, and in the case of
Infinity Baby I was sort of onboard with the themes and messages, but didn't really enjoy a lot of how it was delivered.
The film's main theme is about not growing up, in both the literal and figurative sense, and why that is an understandable but ultimately damaging impulse.
This idea works well in the subplot about Ben, who cycles through women he finds on dating apps. Ben has a friend named Hester (Megan Mullally) who he pays to pretend to be his judgmental mother and drive off girlfriends when he doesn't want to be with them anymore. Ben pines vaguely for a youth he never had---doing lots of drugs and going in costume to goth nightclubs--but we can see that he is unwilling to live in the moment and has always probably been this way. Ben blames women for not being what he wants, even as it becomes clear that he himself can't define what that is. His date-and-dump cycle is disrupted by a woman who is clear-eyed about her feelings and desires but also about Ben's lack of emotional investment in her.
Where the film flopped for me was in the actual Infinity Baby subplot. I did enjoy the opening salvo, where we watch Malcolm and Larry try to offload an infinity baby onto a woman who is clearly uninterested (despite the company being willing to pay $20,000 to caretakers). "Why would I want to care for a living thing that won't grow and mature into someone I can have a conversation with?" she asks. "I mean, this apartment is full of houseplants, right?" Larry dryly observes. Corrigan has always been good at playing indifferent creeps, and he and Starr have good on-screen chemistry as two men who are seemingly in a romantic relationship with each other. It's a weird energy, but it mostly works.
But in the middle, things just get uncomfortable. Larry and Malcolm decide to keep the baby themselves to get the payout, but neither wants to actually care for the baby. Thanks to medication they give the baby, it only eats or poops once a week, and yet the two men still bicker over who has to change her or feed her. So, yeah, there is a long stretch of the film that is trying to mine laughs from child abuse/neglect (and there are some horrible outcomes from this abuse). And for me this not only wasn't all that funny, I didn't really understand the point of it. You would think that the baby would serve to explore the psychology of someone who WANTS a baby, and can't handle the idea of the baby growing up and becoming independent.
The film did somewhat redeem itself for me in the very last 15 minutes or so. We see some fallout from Ben's behavior, and we also see an unexpected development in terms of Larry/Malcolm.
The cast is plenty talented, but the tone never feels quite right, some of the humor skews a bit too mean for me, and the message feels a bit muddled.
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